in her hair, which, now unloosened, twined about her
ivory-like neck and shoulders in a serpentine coil.

Fear, love, anguish, and pleasure seemed alternately to possess her
mobile countenance. Her face indicated violent transitions of passion;
her hands appeared as if struggling after articulate expression of their
own; her limbs were contorted with emotion: in short, every nerve and
fibre in her body seemed to translate the music into movement.

As I looked on, a demon seemed to enter my brain and fingers, hurrying
me into a Bacchanalian frenzy of sound; and the faster I played, the
more furiously her dizzily gliding feet flashed hither and thither in a
bewildering, still-renewing maze, so that from her to me and me to her
an electric impulse of rhythmical movement perpetually vibrated to
and fro.

Ever and anon the semicircle of eagerly watching girls, sympathetically
thrilled by the spectacle, clapped their hands, shouting for joy; and
balancing themselves on tiptoe, joined in the headlong dance. And as
they glided to and fro, the wild roses and ivy and long tendrils of the
vine, flaunting it on the crumbling walls, seemed to wave in unison and
dance round the dancing girls.

As I went on playing the never-ending, still-beginning tune, night
overtook us, and we should have been in profound obscurity but for
continuous brilliant flashes of lightning shooting up from the horizon,
like the gleaming lances hurled as from the vanguard of an army
of Titans.

In the absorbing interest, however, with which we watched the
deliriously whirling figure, unconscious of aught but the music, we took
but little note of the lightning. Sometimes, when from some black
turreted thunder-cloud, a triple-pronged dart came hissing and crackling
to the earth as though launched by the very hand of Jove, I saw thirteen
hands suddenly lifted, thirteen fingers instinctively flying from brow
to breast making the sign of the cross, and heard thirteen voices
mutter as one, "Nel nome del Padre, e del Figlio, e dello
Spirito Santo."

But the ecstatic dancer paused not nor rested in her incredible
exertions; the excited girls alternately told their beads and then
joined in the dance again, while the gray-haired mother, kneeling on the
marble pediment of what might have been the fragment of a temple of
Bacchus, lifted her hands in prayer to a little shrine of the Madonna,
placed there, strangely enough, amidst the relics of paganism.

All of